A Secret Service agent, gone to pieces after losing his wife in a furious gunfight, comes out of three months in a sanatorium with shaky hands and a stupendous suntan, and back at his apartment finds an anonymous death threat written in ancient Aramaic. The story, as it unfolds from …
The Kansas City jazz kings of the Twenties and Thirties are commemorated in some charming archival footage and publicity stills, but mostly in newly shot footage in which the survivors get together again to play and to reminisce. It is something like a home movie of a Thanksgiving Day gathering …
Hokey supernatural thriller set in the English countryside in a traditional Old Dark House, complete with spooky housekeeper and battalion of cats. Sam Elliott is incongruously entertaining as a California tourist with a handsome suntan, a Mark Spitz mustache, and a fondness for expressions like "No deal" and "Take it …
The emotional blackmail implicit in this tedious Biblical spoof, from the Monty Python group, is that by not finding it funny, you are liable to be taken for a bluenose. It could be argued, though, that the followers of Cecil B. DeMille actually have more reason to be offended than …
Two mentally gifted pre-teens from opposite sides of the social scale, and of the Atlantic Ocean, recognize one another as kindred spirits through their mutual interest in the philosophy of Heidegger (whom the slightly more worldly boy has, however, outgrown). There is little else in this ingratiating romantic comedy to …
Routine, if diligently executed, cops-and-mobsters stuff. In the name of "characterization," the Mafia chieftan is given a stutter, his muscleman is given a hearing aid, and his mistress is given a Tammy Wynette record and an assortment of Tammy Wynette wigs. Jill Ireland warms to this last role, putting on …
George Hamilton has his moments in the role of a Count Dracula who migrates to New York when the Romanian government commandeers his castle as a training facility for Nadia Comaneci and the rest of the Romanian Olympic team. But on balance, this vampire spoof, with its ignorant and arrogant …
Truffaut's latest update on Antoine Doinel finds our hero (the ever grungier Jean-Pierre Leaud) in the clutches of a new girlfriend (Dorothée sans surname) who achieves a great leap forward in the evolution of progressively cuter Doinel girlfriends (we first see her in a Snoopy nightie). At the last possible …
Bernardo Bertolucci's slightly psychological study of a teenage boy's subconscious quest for the father he has never known. Jill Clayburgh, a rather scrawny opera singer, is the mother he knows a little too well. A field day for Freudians and other symbolists; an ordeal for most everyone else. The claims …
While investigating some realistic-looking forged bills, international thief Lupin III stumbles across a national conspiracy that dates back hundreds of years. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki.
An assured and energetic visual style, reliant almost to the point of over-reliance on short tracking shots and quick dissolves, makes this futuristic Born Losers worth watching. It is set not so far in the future as to pose problems of production or imagination for the filmmakers, just far enough …
A deeper dimension, if not a whole new definition, has been added to the word "pest" by Barbra "Blabbermouth" Streisand, as a successful perfume manufacturer (her nose is her fortune), who, for far-fetched financial reasons, assumes managership of a reluctant prizefighter. She reads him tips from a boxing-for-boys manual during …
Life and love among the literati in New York City, photographed in stiff, heavy, arty black-and-white by Gordon Willis, and flooded with the music of George Gershwin. Woody Allen, having stayed behind the cameras on his Interiors, is back on screen as his own hero. He has evolved less as …
A profile of postwar Germany in the form of an old Joan Crawford-Barbara Stanwyck career-woman soap opera. There is an honest-to-God, blue-blooded "star" performance by Hanna Schygulla and a collection of dresses for this actress that even the estimable Edith Head would have trouble topping. But R.W. Fassbinder has here …
Doomsday science fiction in the stiff-upper-lip British manner of The Day the Earth Caught Fire, written and directed by Britishers Stanley Mann and Ronald Neame. By the laws of physics which govern a game of billiards, an errant comet sends a monstrous asteroid shooting towards Earth, where it is due …